Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 25 Jan 2017 13:35:10 -0500 | From | Johannes Weiner <> | Subject | Re: [PATCH 01/12] uprobes: split THPs before trying replace them |
| |
On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 08:55:22AM -0800, Srikar Dronamraju wrote: > > > > > > > For THPs page_check_address() always fails. It's better to split them > > > > first before trying to replace. > > > > > > So what does this mean. uprobes simply fails to work when trying to > > > place a probe into a THP memory region? > > > > Looks like we can end up with endless retry loop in uprobe_write_opcode(). > > > > > How come nobody noticed (and reported) this when using the feature? > > > > I guess it's not often used for anon memory. > > > > The first time the breakpoint is hit on a page, it replaces the text > page with anon page. Now lets assume we insert breakpoints in all the > pages in a range. Here each page is individually replaced by a non THP > anonpage. (since we dont have bulk breakpoint insertion support, > breakpoint insertion happens one at a time). Now the only interesting > case may be when each of these replaced pages happen to be physically > contiguous so that THP kicks in to replace all of these pages with one > THP page. Can happen in practice? > > Are there any other cases that I have missed?
We use a hack in our applications where we open /proc/self/maps, copy text segments to a staging area, then create overlay anon mappings on top and copy the text back into them. Now we have THP-backed text and very little iTLB pressure :-)
That said, we haven't run into the uprobes issue yet.
| |